2013, Apr. 10th

 

In 2011, I left my island for studying in a city where the winter lasts for half year. To show people how hard I had tried to blend in the other culture, I made several performances:

 

1. I dressed up like a “typical Asian Babe”, asking people on the street about their Asian Fantasies and tried to achieve them. (“Asian Babe”, 2011)

 

2. I let people go through my legs and be reborn again. (“Across the Universe”, 2012)  

 

3. I showed off my “local relationship” in public. (“Get a Room”, 2012)

 

These pieces have a common ground: they are ones that I would show on my portfolio to prove that I’m a normal nice person, who is embracing my sparkling new life. But when I reviewed those “failure art works” (means I ‘m not going to show them in my portfolio) I had done in Chicago, I found that all these fragments were shouting one thing at me:
 

I AM NOT A NORMAL NICE PERSON

BUT A GHOST LOOKS LIKE A NORMAL NICE PERSON IN THE NEW WORLD.

 

Therefore, I decided to articulate the social meaning of being a ghost. “GHOST” is composed of three different sections: Ghost 0, Ghost ≈, and Ghost [()]. Before proceeding to the description for each section, I want to talk about my interpretation of being a ghost.

 

Being a part of immigration makes me realize how it feels as being a ghost, who is always wandering between two different symbolic systems— one is where it comes from and the other is where it locates. Situated in this awkward/ in-between place, a ghost encounters a huge loss of language and communication. Coming with it are the deferring and distortion of receiving information and expressing. The reception of information is based on seeing and hearing, therefore I choose these two basic elements for my ghost playground: mirror and earplugs, the two ways of locating oneself. When the incoherence of locating oneself by these two means occurs, the ghost starts to emerge from this gap.

 

Ghost 0，Ghost ≈，Ghost [()] echo to each other to bring out the whole thing of being a ghost. Silence never means non-existence of sound, like unseen-ness of ghost doesn’t mean ghost doesn’t exist. In “Ghost 0”, what an audience could hear from the noise-cancelling headphone would be a positive sound, and when they look upward, what they see is things on the ground. In “Ghost ≈”, sound is not for locating but for confirming the information. Couldn’t get the information accurately, so a ghost starts to react by other human being’s reactions/reflection to the information. A ghost doesn’t laugh because the conversation is laughable, it laughs because people laugh. Going through the failure of communication, a ghost realizes what it encounters is about its inability of self-communication, for it never had to build up one when it was a human being. After struggling to figure out how to build its self-communication system, a ghost then gradually apprehends that the possibility of this “self-communication” thing is as suspicious as the existence of unicorn. To the end, a ghost could only define itself by its non-existence in human social network (Ghost [()]).

 

Ghost 0

The audience could sit on a stool, put on a noise-cancelling headphone, and look upward to a mirror hang from the ceiling. The soundtrack is the recording of silence in Baihai temple(Chicago), where people are not allowed to talk inside of it.

 

_____ will climb on the chair.

_____ will put on the headphone.

_____ will listen to the _ _ _ _ _ _ in  _ _ _ _ _ _.